Performance is also quite good for the most part, with little to no lag picked up from the Intel Core i7 from the “Broadwell” generation of processors, or fifth-generation for those playing at home.
Technically, this is a pretty high spec’d machine, and with an Intel Core i7 underneath, you’d be well suited for your regular assortment of office and productivity work, as well as something else, with some Photoshop work if need be. Interestingly, HP has provided a dual-core variant here, so it’s not going to be a total heavy performer, but if you need it to work a little harder, it should have the grunt to get things done.
There’s no discrete video card found here, so don’t expect to do much more than the odd spot of casual gaming, but at least when you do these things, there’ll be a lovely screen to help you along.
That’s something that HP has definitely nailed.
In the Spectre X360, we have what feels like the old Spectre’s Quad HD 2560×1440 display, but Windows feels a lot better on it, with super clear fonts that are easy to read, and a brightness that has the capability to sear your eyelids.
It’s not quite as melodramatic, sure, but it’s a super bright display that looks good and offers some of that touch to make the OS it comes with — Windows 8.1 — far more useful than without.
Granted, in a few months, that will change to the less touch reliant (thankfully) Windows 10, but even there, you’ll have a more than capable touchscreen to do your bidding.
If you opt to not use the touchscreen — and you wouldn’t be alone in that area — you’ll find one of the widest trackpads you’ll ever see.
In fact, the Spectre’s ultra-wide 21:9-inspired touchscreen is so wide, it’s almost ridiculous.
It’s also one of the weaker parts of the system, and interestingly, it’s not the size that makes it this way, but rather just how touchy the pad really gets.
You see, like most modern touchpads, this one supports gestures and even has a button underneath, but the clicking action can tend to click too hard and lock in place, causing the mouse to do rather erratic things, such as maximise and minimise a program when clicked in the Windows Start bar, or get stuck in universal scrolling when all you meant to do was click into a section of a document.
Part of this behaviour might stem from the width of the trackpad and how the button is separated. Normally on a trackpad, the button is divided in half, with the left button for main clicks on the left most side and the right button for context and settings on the right mode side. Many of us have grown up with a divided trackpad and so we’re used to this, so that’s not a huge problem.
Where HP gets this simple and common design wrong stems from that aforementioned ridiculous width, which means the left click — the one most of us use 80 percent of the time — is so far to the left, that most of the time, if you reliant on using your right hand for your mouse, you will probably end up accidentally right clicking just by moving your thumb down to press the trackpad.
Confusingly, we actually found the touchscreen to be easier to use in some areas, though we suspect we could get used to this trackpad with time. We just won’t press the button as much.
One thing of note is noise, because when this computer starts to get itself working, fans do spin into action.
It’s not a high amount of noise, mind you, and you don’t need to look for a lawnmower on your desk. Rather, it’s more of an airy hum as the fans whirr into action, cooling down that hot little Intel Core i7 found inside.
Mind you, it doesn’t seem to take much to get it going: we synchronised our mail for the first time on battery power, and it kicked into gear. That’s probably a good thing, though, as the bottom was getting a wee bit toasty at the time, which is one of the downsides of using metal as a base material, with this material tending to keep the warmth for a touch longer than your legs might like.
Battery life is the other thing we need to talk about, because it can be a little hit and miss with this Core i7 version of the Spectre.
We’ve heard good things from other reviewers, with this laptop technically able to reach a good six hours, but our test of using the computer to type on, check our emails, and take it for a spin as a general productivity machine found closer to beginning of the four hour mark as a maximum.
That’s not a fantastic result for what amounts to such a high end system, though it’s very possible we could get a little more life out of this computer if we just turned the screen down a little and used the computer a little less, especially when HP reports as much as 12.5 hours can be possible from this machine.
We’re not sure how, and we didn’t do much more than web browsing, emails, and writing documents to get our results, but we’re sure it’s possible, and one of the quirks of HP’s setup might have even got in the way.
The noise of the fans was mentioned earlier, and when that spins into gear, it generally won’t spin down and go back to being a silent little Ultrabook until you restart the computer. That means the Spectre X360 is sometimes working a little too hard for its own good, which might be making a negative dent on that battery life.
We see HP still hasn’t fixed one quirk we picked up last year in the original Spectre, and that’s keyboard backlighting. It’s good to have it, really it is, but there are only two settings here: on and off. If you want it brighter or dimmer, tough luck because you just have on and off.
Another quirk rears its head when you decide to flatten the Spectre and turn it into a tablet, which is possible thanks to that 360 degree double-hinge concept HP has been using in its laptops since the Pavilion X360 turned up last year.
The hinges on this computer are far more elegant, as is HP’s flat metal design, but the concept is still the same, with a screen that will fold all the way back to push up next to the back of the keyboard, making this 13 inch Spectre X360 into a 13 inch Windows tablet of sorts.
But the moment you do that, you might find the touchpad still working, at least until you touch the display with your fingers and get to using the computer as a big tablet.
It’s one of those bizarre little bugs, because while the keyboard is deactivated when used in this way, something you can likely attribute to an accelerometer or internal compass, the mouse stays active for a little longer, allowing you to move it simply based on how you hold the oversized tablet.
We’re sure that bug will get fixed sooner rather than later, and we hope one of the touchscreen quirks does too, which saw us trying to punch in a passcode on the touchscreen only to have the computer pick up that there was a keyboard attach and to keep closing up our on-screen touch-based number pad.
Conclusion
The 2015 follow-up to HP’s Spectre is a worthy addition, upgrading the specs, improving the design, and generally making the laptop come together to still be one of HP’s better machines in years.
It’s still not perfect, and we’d like to see better battery life next time and a trackpad that feels more usable than the touchscreen, because that’s a rare occurrence that a laptop mouse is less usable than the touch panel.
But if you can forgive these things, the quirks and whatnot, you’ll find the Spectre X360 is worth checking out. We wouldn’t use it as a tablet, but as a laptop, it is quite a lovely little machine.
